Time change weekend used to be one of the funniest times of the year for me, back when I was writing.
It all started back in the early 2000s. I was trolling through the NWTF forum and stumbled on a thread discussing how the onset of DST was going to affect turkey hunting. I saw this as a golden bit of material and began writing reports on the effect of DST on the turkeys. In the fall, I did the same thing with the deer. Over the years, you'd be amazed at how many people bit.
Over time, I evolved the Blackhole Institute of [Deer in fall/Turkey in spring] Studies and staffed it with various characters borrowed from other bits of my apocryphal writing. Chief of these was poor Scooter. Scooter had originally been the orphan mascot of the pro-staffers at Deer and Deer Hunting Magazine. Some folks had the idea that the pro-staffers had some central facility where we met. Mind you, there were supposed to be one pro-staffer per state, although I doubled up and did Ohio as well as Kentucky. I and a couple of other pro-staffers fed the fantasy. Yes, we had a secret facility. Yes, we all hung out together. Yes, we even kept an orphan boy named Scooter, and were teaching him how to be a consummate deer hunter. Scooter had an elaborate back story, so I borrowed him for the Black Hole Institute.
You'd be surprised how many folks treated this seriously. Some of my fellow pro-staffers were sharing email with me. We were getting questions about how we had to prove our mettle as pro-staffers (feats of strength, woodsmanship, etc.) I got a heartfelt serious email from a high-schooler in Kentucky who wanted to dedicate his life to being a pro-staffer and wanted to know how to apply.
Scooter had a rough time of it. Every season, he'd get injured trying to place the temperature probe into the buck or gobbler. Or something else would happen while studying the effect of DST on game. At one point, I announced that we'd had a breakthrough and that the Blackhole Institute was now selling an anti-DST clock.
Announcing the Anti-DST ClockThat's #3 son, Angus, playing the part of Scooter. The idea of the clock was you set it to the old time and convince the deer or turkeys that nothing's changed.
At some point the schtick with Scooter kind of wore thin. By this time it had been a decade or so. I killed off Scooter and his girlfriend in some terrible lab accident and was left with their infant son, that (of course) was adopted by the Black Hole Institute. Wash Rinse Repeat. Shortly after that D&DH and T&TH closed their forums and did away with their pro-staff. I walked away with many fun memories of thoroughly catfished readers screaming that DST had nothing to do with game behavior and a few sad memories of the souls that bought in.
